Zzot!

…I’ve switched (server-side) blog software. Old URLs should be redirected to new ones, where appropriate.¹

Why the switch? Ultimately it comes down to language preferences. There were parts of this site that I never bothered to get working, and converting my ideas into Movable Type templates just didn’t appeal to me.² One such example is the archives — MT just listed posts there with little structure. Sure, WP doesn’t even generate anything there by default, so I’m building it from scratch instead of fixing a template I don’t like, but I just find WordPress easier.

My natural distaste for object-based Perl meant that in Movable Type I tended to avoid mucking around “under the hood”, so I was largely stuck with the tags and features it ships with or that plug-in authors had made. WordPress is PHP, so if something doesn’t work how I want, there’s a much lower barrier to patch it via a plug-in. This isn’t a political statement of some sort, where I turn to WordPress because it’s free software; for that matter, I’m not even saying that WordPress is better software.³

So, at last count, I have two site-specific plug-ins, two others I’ve downloaded and installed, and obviously a site-specific theme. Oh, and I went through all my old posts and converted between text-markup schemes.⁴ As usual, be sure to use the non-functional feedback link above to let me know what stuff is more broken now than it was before.

1. At least, they will be, once I throw the switch that shows this post, and the new blog, to the world [↩]
2. that being why they were left un-working [↩]
3. Better for me, perhaps… [↩]
4. I’d started off using Textile, but now I’m using Markdown, and it just seemed silly to be running with two different ones and a plug-in to make that possible. [↩]

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Zzot.net moved to a new host recently, and as of the last day or so, everything should be working again. I think.

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So, the site actually has the little clumps of links inserted now, complete with a single such clump of links (dated a couple days ago). They’re not available in feed form yet — I haven’t really decided how. It seems like just throwing them in the regular feeds with real posts would be bad in some way that I haven’t yet figured out how to articulate. More to come..?

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I’m playing around with the idea of a linkblog (among other things), so stuff might be semi-working for a while.

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I edited most of the posts from the last couple months over the weekend to account for me having changed the encoding of the site and my MT install. Oh, and I changed the encoding of my site and my MT install. It looked like that beyond that, messages didn’t need correction (which correlates with changes in my toolchain) — let me know if you find anything to the contrary.

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I think it would be overstating the case to say comments are “working”, but it is at least possible to insert one into the system now. I changed the URLs for all the CGIs today, but I expect that only effects me (anyone else would probably be clicking a link, and those should all be updated).

In a related matter, trackbacks were never working, apparently; I had never put anything behind the CGI’s URL, and that made it difficult to invoke the script in question. That should be working now as well.

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The little dateline block at the bottom of entries on index pages are showing more info (again) — including the numbers of pings and comments. Entry pages are showing pings and comments again, the trackback mechanics (which had been there, in spite of not displaying the results anywhere) are a little more obvious than they had been, and there are auto-discoverable links to my feeds everywhere.

All that isn’t to say that everything is happy again, but it’s closer.

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I just made a handful of tweaks to the site:

• I fixed a back-end markup problem with code blocks (such as that in the
  preceding post). Because of this:
  • Pages now validate in the presence of code samples
  • The code swatches are run through Beautifier
  • The feeds are back, with (I think) the same relative paths as before

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Good news — I worked around the problem with the testing stylesheet was being displayed by default on Safari. Not particularly well, mind you, but it’s better than it was. I’ll dig into supported attributes soon-ish to see if there’s a better solution.

Bad news — I fixed this in JavaScript, the defect appears to apply to KHTML in general, but making the detector that triggers the fix less selective (to include anything KHTML-based) doesn’t work. I’m pretty sure there’s something wacky with the JavaScript part, however, since alert(navigator.userAgent) doesn’t seem to work either.

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Okay, two more of the site’s templates have been updated to follow the overall design; specifically those for the daily and monthly archive pages. I’m not saying that those pages are great now — they’re not. But at least they look right now.

Here are some items that remain:

• Both the Sitemap and the Monthly Archives pages serve basically the same purpose, so I will probably merge them together.
• The Sitemap’s layout is still a little rough
• So are the comment forms
• The breadcrumbs at the top of each entry page lead up the by Date hierarchy, but now that there is a by Category hierarchy, maybe they should be changed?

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